Comment on Consumer hardware is no longer a priority for manufacturers
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 days agoI mean, I’d kill for a Chinese GPU. But lock-in for your Steam back catalog is strong.
Also, have you been watching all the Chinese GPU announcements? They’re all in on machine learning ASICs too.
Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
There is already a lot of good Chinese DDR 5 memory on the market and it’s a matter of time before Chinese GPU’s and CPU’s proliferate. I remember people in the west global north were sceptic about the viability of Chinese electric cars ever existing just 5 years ago; Elon even laughed at the possibility. Tables turn fast when you have industrial capacity and central planning.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Chinese electric cars were always going to take off. RAM is just a commodity; if you sell the most bits at the lowest price and sufficient speed, it works.
If you’re in edge machine learning, if you write your own stacks, Chinese hardware will be killer.
But if you’re trying to run Steam games? Or CUDA projects? That’s a whole different story. It doesn’t matter how good the hardware is, they’re always going to be handicapped by software in “legacy” code. Not just for performance, but driver bugs/quirks.
Proton emulation (and focusing everything on a good Vulkan driver) is not a bad path forward, but still.
Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
But i feel it’s not a matter of the Industry adapting into an entirely different ecosystem. As in, i don’t think that China will be taking over the computer industry. I feel it will be more of an issue of giving American companies and their anti-consumer practices something they haven’t had during their lifetimes: Real competition. I feel a lot of attitudes could change once they are in an ecosystem where they don’t have the luxury of monopolies and closed environments and i feel we are long overdue for having new players in this difficult field. It’s not about being a China shill either but in the end competition is good for the consumer. It’s concerning that all American tech industries are in bed with each other and also in bed with a government bent in global control and totalitarian surveillance. I don’t think Chinese manufacturers could be exempt from these dangers but at least it will give consumers the possibilities to pick their poison.
Also, GPU and graphics standards have changed in less than decades. We can still play old games in new software. AAA Developer models are clearly dying and new standards for Indie and AA development are emerging. Some of the hottest games this year could be defined as made by indie studios. So instead of hitting a wall i feel gaming in general could be moving into a new paradigm and i sure as hell wish that paradigm is not cloud computing.
I am not a dedicated gamer. I am from south America and I am playing Expedition 33 with full graphics on a 10 year old, entry range GPU on an old AMD CPU with 32 gigs of DDR 4 memory. And I’m having fun! And this rig works great for my job with a variety of open sourced and pirated software. I don’t need the latest and the greatest. I just need something that gives me results at an affordable price. Lets say that for the next 5 years that might be the new standard as the industry self corrects.